Tracy Lang earns the 2005 Amy Award for taking her medium to a new extreme.

Third time’s the charm for island artist Tracy Lang.

Lang is the winner of this year’s prestigious Amy Award for her outsized woodcut prints, after near misses in 2003 and 2004. The honor comes with a cash prize of $3,000 – enough to make a substantial difference in the life of a young artist.

And for a printmaker to whom each piece of paper represents a $250 investment, the prize may be essential to a growing body of work.

“I’m going to do a series of at least six to seven to fill up a big gallery,” said Lang, who works in a studio off Madison Avenue in downtown Winslow.

“At least, that’s the goal. I’m doing them slowly and making sure that I do them right,” she said. “It’s like buying a used car each time I order paper.”

Lang prints on paper 79 inches square; unrolled, one sheet almost spans her studio from wall to wall.

Her decision to go big plays with the history of the woodcut as a relatively minor medium that was most often printed on a small scale.

“I’m really focused on taking something incredibly realistic and super-traditional like the figure, and pushing it to the limit, to the point where it’s random abstraction,” she said. “But at the same time, it has this psychological atmosphere once you figure out what’s going on. It’s supposed to make you feel really good but really little.”

Her prints feature splayed feet and tree-trunk legs seen from below, a perspective that recalls the vantage point of a small child. The negative space in the prints – the areas not assigned a positive form – are dynamically charged with whorls of carved lines eddying around ragged shapes in solid black, where the wood has been cut away altogether.

The references to cartography and landscape help create an ambiguous but vast-seeming space that helps the feet and columnar legs assume the scale of a Colossus of Rhodes.

“I definitely am trying to work my pieces as if they were a chart, a territory that you have to interpret,” Lang said, “or a maze. I wanted to push it away from the realm of ‘oh, this is just a figure piece,’ and into the realm of abstraction, so it would take you a while to figure out that it was even figurative.”

Lang footnotes several influential but unnamed patrons for her move to the large canvas.

“They sort of forced me into it,” Lang said. “They said, ‘Look, you have to go big if you want to show in big galleries.’ I had the images all worked up, that wasn’t the problem. But they facilitated the experience.”

Lang’s patrons helped underwrite her first large prints, which were 4-by-8 feet, the dimensions of standard-size plywood sheets.

For the first two in her current series, prints that Lang has underwritten with her own funds, she hinged two oak-surfaced plywood sheets together, then carved the surface with a small drill.

When it came time to print, Lang removed the hinges and nailed the boards to the floor of a Seattle studio, carefully aligning the edges.

Next came a race against time as Lang and three helpers rolled two pounds of ink onto the panels, with just seven minutes to print before the ink would dry.

To make the occasion unusually exciting, four of the eight helpers she needed to print didn’t shown up. Lang dragooned four total strangers – workers from a nearby business – to help float the expensive paper onto the panels.

Next came a sort of barefoot conga line as, under Lang’s direction, each printer grabbed the waist of the next, and the line snaked around the paper with the “dancers” trying to stomp on the whole surface.

“So then every single spot gets hit by 16 feet,” Lang said. “It’s hilarious.”

Working larger has made Lang’s work that much more difficult to sell, but the prints are getting shown. Several have hung in the office of Seattle’s Real­Networks over the past six months.

For the Amy Award ceremony, the prints were displayed outside at the home of Caren and Dave Anderson, the island couple who first endowed the annual award five years ago to honor their late daughter, Amy.

As the setting sun made the paper glow, Lang said she found a new appreciation for the increasing size of her artworks.

“The concept of going big was pushed on me,” she said. “Now I’ve just taken it and run with it, because of the build-up of my confidence.

“I mean, it really helps to have an award of money and things like that that say ‘Here, you can do this.’”